But the State Department surrendered to the contentions of England.We submitted to countless outrages (see extract from Senator Chamberlain’s speech under “[England Threatens United States]”); we made it unpleasant for native Americans who determined to send non-contraband goods across the seas; approved England’s assumption of dictatorial control of the commerce of Holland and Scandinavia and held that Germany was equally our enemy as England’s on the ground that in using her submarines to sink merchant vessels feeding England she had violated our rights to the free use of the seas.
In thus abandoning cardinal principles which made us a great nation and recognizing as effective, legal and justified, England’s blockade of neutral nations, her right to confiscate non-contraband goods, to search and deprive Red Cross surgeons of their instruments, rifle our mail, remove American citizens from neutral vessels and incarcerate them, prevent Red Cross supplies from reaching the civil population and to do all the things we said she should not do, we have surrendered to Great Britain rights, powers and privileges that can hardly be justified unless we are about to dissolve our political institutions and merge ourselves with England as one people—two souls with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.
The point is that future wars will not be decided by the usual engines of war, but by the starvation of the civil population; this invests the nation having the largest fleet with a terrible weapon of annihilation; it makes England the arbiter of nations—it compels us to compact our own terrible power of destruction, for in making food the sine qua non of victory, fate has given us a factor of far-reaching importance. And how will a nation menaced with extinction by famine retaliate? Will the inevitable consequence be that the nation so threatened will meet starvation with the subtle poison germs of a malignant plague?
Brest-Litovsk Treaty.
Brest-Litovsk Treaty.—It is an approved trick of political strategy to raise a hue and cry over one matter in order to divert attention from another, and by this token to accuse one’s enemies of treachery, baseness and all the sins in the calendar with a professed feeling of righteous indignation. Thus the Brest-Litovsk treaty between Germany and Russia, when the former was in a position to impose her terms as conqueror upon its beaten foe, was made to appear as an act of unexampled oppression. In the light of the terms ultimately imposed upon Germany by the Paris Peace Treaty, it is interesting to examine the cardinal features of the Brest-Litovsk treaty. Under its terms as revised by the three supplementary agreements signed in Berlin in August, 1918, several weighty concessions were made to Russia which insured her routes of trade and free ports in the Baltic provinces which were given their independence in accordance with century-long aspirations and revolutionary movements. Germany dropped her Caucasus claims and demanded that Russia should recognize the independence of Georgia, Finland, Ukrania, Poland, Esthonia and Livonia. Russia, desiring to assure herself of the rich territory with the naptha fields of Baku, Germany supported the wish on condition that Russia pledge herself to place a portion of the oil production at the disposal of Germany and its allies. The total indemnity levied was 6,000,000,000 marks ($1,500,000,000) which Russia undertakes to pay, all sums lost by Germans up to July 1, 1917, through revolutionary confiscatory legislation being included. Independent courts were provided for the adjudication of claims and one-sixth of the indemnity was shifted to Finland and the Ukraine jointly. This was reputed to be the oppressor’s toll unheard of in history—no milch cows, no horses, no surrender of the instruments of industry, no seizure of strictly Russian territory, independence for all states that had been struggling for independence through long centuries, no occupied zones.
“Bombing Maternity Hospitals.”
“Bombing Maternity Hospitals.”—Nominally a favorite occupation of the enemy throughout the war. The following was written by the late Richard Harding Davis in the Metropolitan Magazine for November, 1915: “So highly trained now are the aviators, so highly perfected the aeroplane that each morning in squadrons they take flight, to meet hostile aircraft, to destroy a munition factory, or, if they are Germans, a maternity hospital. At sunset, like homing pigeons, in safety they return to roost.”
Creel and the “Sisson Documents.”
Creel and the “Sisson Documents.”—George Creel, a Denver politician, was appointed head of the Committee of Public Information pending the war, and was practically in control of the American press and the propaganda work. Exercising almost unlimited authority and directing general publicity at home and in Europe, includingthe presentation of war films, many of the oppressive measures against the liberal press are justly charged to his account, at the same time that numerous measures inaugurated under his direction attracted widespread notoriety. Among others, the bureau issued to the American press the notorious “Sisson documents.” They consisted of a series of documents to prove that Lenine and Trotzky, heads of the Russian Soviet government, had taken German money and were, first and last, German agents. The New York “Evening Post” was quick to discern the forgery—they are said to have been written in London, translated into Russian in New York by two Russians and sent to Russia, where they were “discovered.” For pointing out the internal evidence of their incredibility contained in the papers Mr. Creel charged the paper with being guilty “of the most extraordinary disservice” to the government of the United States and the nation’s cause; claiming that it had impugned the good faith of the government and exposed itself to “the charge of having given aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States in an hour of national crisis.” The ultimate end was that the famous Sisson documents were proved to be clumsy forgeries and Mr. Creel subsequently claimed for them no more than that they made a good story.
The Creel bureau cost the government about $6,000,000, and its affairs were found to be in hopeless confusion, according to official reports made to Congress, Creel being charged with gross negligence in handling the government’s funds. In June, 1919, frauds in the handling of war films, involving huge sums of money and “the complicity of high officials” were charged in Congress. Mr. Creel’s connection with the Sisson documents places him in no flattering light. In reply to a letter of protest against the publicity of the Sisson documents and the use made of them, he wrote: “Of course, you are entitled to your opinion, but I warn you it seems to border on sedition.” While this bureau flagrantly compromised the reputation of the government and the American people by a piece of wicked fiction, to deny the authenticity of the Sisson documents was sedition.